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Benatar argues that the absence of cosmic meaning is part of the reason why our lives are so bad that we had better not procreate. The goal of this paper is to argue against this claim from a Kantian point of view. For this goal, I argue first that the fact that human life is a product of blind evolution is not a reason for justifying that our lives are overall bad, mainly on the grounds that the concepts of good and bad make sense only within the logical space of reasons. I also argue that the fact that we can hardly make a significant difference to the universe is not a reason for justifying that our lives are overall bad, either, mainly on the grounds that whether one's life is good or bad can be evaluated primarily in terms of whether one's permissible ends are achieved to a satisfactory extent, and so one's good life does not depend on making a significant difference to the universe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of Donald Davidson's collection of essays in his book 'Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective' and a discussion on his new kind of anti-sceptical argument are presented. Davidson's argument that any one who accepts his version of semantic externalism cannot be a global sceptic is challenged because his version cannot rule out global scepticism, and in his view sensations are not epistemic, but they are just casual intermediaries.

Donald Davidson's slingshot argument against the correspondence theory of truth is flawed. The principles on which the argument is based are implausible.

Sydney Shoemaker's proposal for reconciling the conflict between first-person authority on one's own mental states and occurrences of self-deception is discussed. Topics include self-deception in relation to self-ascribed belief, and unavailable belief.

Recently, Anil Gupta raised several important objections against Wilfrid Sellars's theory of perception. The purpose of this paper is to defend Sellars's theory of perception against these objections. I admit that some aspects of his theory are problematic: for example, there are good reasons to reject Sellars's view that the ultimate referent of a perceptual taking is a sense impression. Nonetheless, I argue that a Sellarsian account of perception is still a viable approach to perception, despite Gupta's powerful objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the use of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the relevant conceptual norms. Recently, Ginsborg raises two important objections against this view. According to her, the normativity Brandom ascribes to concepts lacks the internalist or first-person character of normativity that Kant's view demands, and the relevant normativity belongs properly not to concepts as such, but rather to belief or assertion. The purpose of this paper is to defend a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts against these objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

D.H. Finkelstein offers a proposal about the distinction between conscious and unconscious belief. On his proposal, someone's belief is conscious if he has an ability to express it simply by self-ascribing it, and someone's belief is unconscious if he lacks such ability.

Copyright of Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

According to the truth-conduciveness problem of coherentism, the coherence theory of justification can hardly show that coherentist justification is truth-conducive. This problem is generally conceived as the most recalcitrant problem with the coherence theory. The purpose of this paper is to show that it does not pose a serious problem for a certain version of coherentism, namely a Sellarsian explanatory coherence theory of justification combined with the deflationary theory of truth. On this version of coherentism, our epistemic goal is to gradually improve our conceptual framework so as to maximize its explanatory coherence, and there is no substantial norm of truth independent of the norms of justification, so that we cannot evaluate the truth-conduciveness of a belief independently of the norms of justification. I argue that this version of coherentism can cope with the truth-conduciveness problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Belief instability has received much attention from philosophers. The 'revision theory of belief is believed to be circular because our notion of truth is circular, and this circularity is the source of the paradox. In order to understand the notion and paradox of instability, it is important to consider the value and the original formulation of the truth.